Primary season has a way of reducing grand, soul-searching battles into questions you can cup in your hand: Are you better off now? Why not the best? Whom do you trust? Candidates unspool speeches on education and health care and economic policy, and then they trip over questions about where the Confederate flag should fly and whether they can tell if a person is gay and "How off-beat is your heart anyway, Senator?" There are still nine months of ads and polls and policy papers to go, but there may never be a better time than these next few weeks to sit right up close to the small stage, where you can hear the lines that are flubbed and see the costumes that don't quite fit and watch the candidates trying to master their roles.

The single most dramatic change has been Al Gore's transformation from wooden soldier to junkyard dog. The commentariat made fun of every move by the loyal, refined Vice President who thought a change of clothes and address could turn him into an Alpha male. But his rivals aren't laughing now. The ones who've tangled with him over the years have always known that behind closed doors, in budget fights and partisan brawls, Gore was a pitiless enemy; and now he's taken it public. What was derided as a phony makeover turns out to bring us closer to the truth about Gore, and whatever limbs he rips off Bill Bradley, whatever truth he shaves and scars he leaves would be nothing compared with what he'd try to do to a Republican with whom he actually disagreed. He has been so effective that Republicans who once wanted to run against Gore now have the opposite fantasy. They want the lefty professor Bradley to win and are worried about going up against the scrappy Vice President who, as a veteran of two Bush campaigns put it, "reminds me of Lee Atwater. He counterpunches, and he counterpunches fast."

Bradley knows this better than anyone. Mr. Authentic, with the well-worn shoes and soft voice and goodness platform, who hired the ad agency to help package him as the unpackaged candidate, said he wanted a different kind of campaign, noble and high protein. But Gore wanted to do it the old-fashioned way. Bradley might survive as the un-Politician but only if he is willing to fight for it and, by extension, fight for us. So far, he seems not to grasp the role televised debates play these days. They are no longer pro-bowl versions of high school oratory contests; increasingly, debates are the arena itself, where most of the winning and losing and living and dying of candidates takes place. His contempt for Gore just looked like bad manners, but his message that the whole ugly process of becoming President was beneath him just looked bad.

His fellow upstart John McCain is trying to play the hardest role of all: a Washington insider with a conservative record running as a maverick outsider on a centrist platform, against the guy his whole party crowned months ago. Maybe that's why he seems to be having the most fun onstage; no one in the audience has a clue about what he's going to do next. But it's a lot to juggle: his rhetoric as a reformer against his record as a Commerce Committee chairman; his reputation as a straight talker against his need to mollify flag wavers in South Carolina; his luck that New Hampshire loves mavericks against his certain knowledge that his party hates them.

Through all this, it would be easy to miss what could turn out to be a defining battle--the one that never happened. George W. Bush never had to fight for name recognition; he never had to fight for money or friends in high places. But the really costly war he never had to wage was the one that time and again has crippled Republicans by Easter--the fight to win over the conservative faithful with all sorts of promises and pledges and litmus tests that haunt the candidate for the rest of the campaign. From the very first day, Bush positioned himself as a new kind of Republican, who talked about the poor and spoke Spanish and spanked the House Republicans for their cold hearts and small minds. Democrats may think Bush's vow to cut taxes, "so help me God," will backfire in the fall, but Bush believes Republicans were put on earth to cut taxes, and he at least brags about how much his plan would do for the working poor.

Maybe conservatives have kept quiet about all this moderation because they know something about Bush's actual record: the abortion restrictions he's promoted, the felons he's executed, the welfare rolls he's pared. Or maybe they just want to win and are winking at him as he flirts with the minivan moms. Last week he dutifully denounced Roe v. Wade, and there is a good chance that in the coming days, he will have to step further to the right to stave off last-minute surges from conservative rivals Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes. But these are baby steps compared with the desperate lunges of recent Republican campaigns. The irony there is that this great stroke of luck for Bush is a gift from John McCain.

A gift because the one thing no one imagined in a Republican primary was that the threat to the Establishment candidate might come from the left rather than the right. McCain is giving the untested Austin operation an early workout, without forcing Bush to say much that he would later regret. He has not called on Bush to make pledges on term limits, on guns, on abortion and on all the other things that drove Bob Dole crazy four years ago, notes Scott Reed, who ran Dole's campaign. "McCain has made everything easier for Bush." McCain has even inspired Bush to drop a cue card or two and actually answer voters' questions. Gore should be so lucky, to have a sparring partner who draws more lessons than blood from him.